Thread by @drvolts

I despair of screaming this into the void, but voters are not primarily responding to inflation, they are responding to a massive, highly coordinated propaganda campaign across multiple media designed to freak them out about inflation.

Replace "inflation" in that tweet with literally anything else. The notion that voters are carefully assessing the evidence of their own local experience to draw conclusions about national affairs is a bit of folk wisdom US politics just won't let go.

It's like looking at hurricane damage & asking "how will voters respond to climate change?"

Yes, the damage is real, but what it *means* -- the emotional resonance, what it portends, who is at fault, the larger frame into which it fits -- is thoroughly mediated.

For example: why is inflation dominating headlines rather than the startling & spectacular decline in child poverty in the US? Voters just "naturally" care more about expensive milk than they do about kids not starving? huffpost.com/entry/inflatio…

Lots of very predictable bad takes in response to this. As always when inflation comes up, I highly recommend everyone read this interview w/ @JWMason1. Ask yourself whether the public understands this & if not, why not. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Ask yourself if "and therefore, we need austerity" is just the natural, normal response of ordinary Americans to literally every economic phenomenon that comes along.

I should be doing ... anything else, but I can't help myself. I want to follow up on this, because "organic discontent" is actually a helpful way into the point I'm making.

https://twitter.com/EricLevitz/status/1460777533075513348

What would "organic" as opposed to "artificial" (stoked, manufactured, hyped) discontent look like? Here's another way of phrasing the question: how would Americans react to the rising price of gasoline & groceries ...

... in the *absence* of a coordinated campaign by conservative pols, talking heads, tv shows, radio shows, & social media sites to hammer on it, frame it as a comprehensive apocalypse that will kill Christmas, & blame it on Biden's social spending?

Not just that: in the absence of a nigh 60-year propaganda campaign to convince Americans that gov't is incompetent, that social spending is always "wasteful," & that inflation is the inevitable consequences of low interest rates & gov't spending.

How would Americans react to rising prices (of a few key goods) if they were not swimming in that soup of conservative myths, tropes, & outright lies?

The answer, of course, is: we don't know. That counterfactual is so alien to our US experience we can scarcely imagine it.

I'm sure in any case Americans would *notice & dislike* expensive gas. But would they connect expensive gas & expensive shipped goods into some larger, independent, evil force called "inflation"? Would they view it as a catastrophe, even as many other economic indicators ...

... are positive & they're receiving Covid relief & CTC checks? Would they assume it must be the president's fault, & specifically the fault of social spending?

Those interpretive frames are not *inevitable*. They're not intrinsic to high prices. They're not "organic."

And really, insofar as "organic" means "unmediated" or "unshaped by interpretive frames common in culture," there is no such thing. We don't have any unmediated baseline to compare against. We can only imagine different mediation, different frames.

My simple point in all this is, we need to stop pretending (explicitly or implicitly) that public reaction/opinion is a direct, spontaneous response to facts on the ground. It *never* is, on *anything*. Everything is mediated, even personal experience.

And more specifically, in the US today, everything is mediated by the absolutely ubiquitous RW propaganda apparatus, which has been consciously seeding anti-gov't frames & myths for decades & explicitly uses every news event to reinforce them & advance its political interests.

I worry that we've gotten so used to this state of affairs that we've stopped noticing it, like fish don't notice water. We just revert to the naive interpretation: "oh, I guess when gas prices rise, Americans don't want universal pre-K or cheaper prescription drugs any more!"

I have no idea how to escape or change the polluted information/media environment we've created in this country. I don't have any "solution" for it. I guess the one thing I feel like I can do is pound the table & force people to at least *acknowledge* it.

It's real, it's out there, it's powerful, and it's the primary reason that Americans are reacting to rising prices *in the particular way they are*. Conservatives can pretend these reactions are inevitable or "natural," but the rest of us shouldn't.